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MADRID (AP) — A Spanish court has ruled that Amazon broke labor laws by forcing more than 2,000 delivery drivers to use an app that the company controlled for scheduling work and payments and requiring them to use their own cars and cellphones on the job. Amazon could not treat workers using its Flex app as self-employed because the e-commerce giant's Spanish subsidiary “assumes the authority to make all decisions regarding the service, setting the conditions of execution and remuneration, and the circumstances of the day, time and duration” of labor, according to the Madrid labor court's decision released Friday. Amazon stopped using the Flex app in Spain in 2021. Friday's ruling is the result of a lawsuit brought by Spain’s social security body following a 2019 labor inspection at an Amazon facility. The government agency is seeking to recoup payments that it says Amazon should have made on behalf of the drivers. Amazon has long argued that Flex was an intermediary … [Read more...] about Spanish court: Amazon violated labor law with delivery app

On a cold Tuesday afternoon in January, four women made their way down Guernsey Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. They had just finished lunch at Acre , a Japanese cafe and shop, where they had been served bento boxes and green tea, and were headed to 50 Norman , a new warehouse space nearby that housed three other Japanese businesses. The women, all Japanese immigrants, had driven in from New Jersey, at the advice of their friend, Chieko Koie, who had already dined at Acre and was interested in visiting the warehouse after seeing it on Instagram. The group’s first stop at 50 Norman was Dashi Okume , which sells dashi, a soup base typically made from ingredients like dried fish, seaweed and mushrooms. The business, which opened in Tokyo in 1871, offers various ready-made dashi powder blends, as well as bins of dried ingredients for customers to make their own. “For Japanese people, dashi is really important for making food,” Ms. Koie said. “It’s like a piece of home here in … [Read more...] about Sake. Dashi. Soba Shops: Japanese Chic Takes Root in Brooklyn

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 5 Wall Street had its eyes Friday on big tech after some of the biggest companies in the world posted lackluster quarterly financial performances. That included Apple Inc. The company posted its first quarterly revenue drop in nearly four years after pandemic-driven restrictions on its China factories curtailed sales of the latest iPhone during the holiday season. Amazon reported worse-than-expected fourth-quarter profits, but its revenue beat expectations boosted by sales in its cloud-computing unit AWS, which is also seeing a slow-down in growth. Google’s parent company Alphabet posted a lower profit and a small revenue increase for last year’s fourth quarter, as a decline in online ad spending and competition from rivals weigh on the search giant. While overall revenue grew, advertising revenue fell by nearly 4% and revenue at YouTube declined 8% year-over-year. … [Read more...] about Google, Apple, Amazon give investors reason to fret

0 Arts & Entertainment Purchase electric holiday lights that are listed by an approved testing agency and follow the manufacturer's directions. Press Release Desk , News Partner Posted Reply Press release from the City of Cambridge: December 15, 2020 Please read these holiday safety reminders from Cambridge Fire Department: Holiday Trees: Selecting a Tree: Give natural trees a fresh cut at the base and place them in water immediately. When purchasing a tree, buy one that is as fresh as possible. Tap the butt on the ground and grab a branch near the top and pull your hand along it slowly. Needles should not fall off. If you bend a needle and it breaks before bending in half, it’s too dry! • Caring for the Tree: Make a fresh cut an inch or two off bottom before placing it stand. This will help with absorption. Water a live tree every day. When the tree becomes dry, discard it promptly. • Placing the Tree: … [Read more...] about Christmas Tree, Holiday Safety Tips For Cambridge Residents

Con artists are using dating apps to prey on lonely people, and older ones are a growing target. In a pattern that accelerated during the isolation of the coronavirus pandemic, romance scams claimed $139 million from adults age 60 and older in 2020, according to data from the Federal Trade Commission, up from $84 million the year before. In one of the more alarming episodes of what has become a leading type of fraud aimed at older Americans, a Holocaust survivor was swindled out of his life savings of nearly $3 million, according to a federal indictment unsealed in New York last week. How do romance scams work? Alone at home as Covid-19 spread in the summer of 2020, Kate Kleinert decided to accept a Facebook friend request from a handsome stranger. He described himself as a Norwegian doctor working in Iraq and called himself Tony. After a couple of months of daily communication on encrypted messaging apps, Tony began asking for money. By December 2020, Ms. Kleinert, 69, had … [Read more...] about Retirees Are Losing Their Life Savings to Romance Scams. Here’s What to Know.

When Charles McGonigal, a former counterintelligence chief with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was accused of using his position to benefit an associate’s business in Eastern Europe, it represented a startling turn for a high-ranking official who had been entrusted with access to some of the most sensitive secrets held by the American intelligence community. But it also set off a scramble within the bureau to assess the potential damage and determine whether any counterintelligence or law enforcement operations were compromised, according to two people familiar with the review, with the F.B.I.’s director, Christopher A. Wray, treating the case as a top priority. “It puts a question mark next to everything he was involved in,” said Holden Triplett, a former F.B.I. counterintelligence official who left in 2020 and co-founded Trenchcoat Advisors, a risk management consultancy. “You’d be trying to figure out, ‘OK, when did this start and what did he touch after it started?’” … [Read more...] about How Prosecutors Say a Top F.B.I. Agent Sold His Services Overseas